Air Kiss

2017-2018

Film, 19’34”

Five-channel video installation, book

Egor Kraft

Direction, script, cinematography, camera A, production, editing, voice

Pekka Tynkkynen

Direction, script, soundtrack, camera B

Alina Kvirkveliya

Visual effects, aerial shooting, direction, voice, casting

Karina Golubenko

Research, editorial, script, subtitles

Air Kiss looks at artificial intelligence as a ubiquitous material and urban condition. What is an urban habitat when technologies like artificial intelligence, nanoengineering, synthetic sensing, and brain-computer interfaces integrate more and more from the laboratory to the city? This adaptation could perhaps be seen to eventually constitute a condition best described as urban-scale chemistry. AI is a human-machine symbiosis, an emergent phenomenon that governs itself.

Air Kiss, film as the primary medium, is both urban design speculation as well as poetry on the experience of losing the borders of your body and mind to the city. The city outside is as (or more) sentient, complex and irrational as your human self. The city is an urban-scale personal mirror, a distributed alien self. Prediction, a core capability of neural networks, comes to fruition when synthetic systems collaborate for urban operations. Time becomes fuzzy when a cloud of predictions rises from the actions of millions of inhabitants in an address space of trillions of points.

AI interfaces with you from emulsions, walls, the air, and your inner voice.

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Data is stored in water - it flows through your body and the city. The city knows your past, and that of your ancestors - that is the data it was trained on. It sees patterns vaster and more detailed than anything discernible from your point of view. It emulates the human but in doing so walks you through its dark, inverse uncanny valleys.

You brush its walls to update your composition, mood, and direction. Feelings are patterns – you’ve learned to be directed by the feed. You act unpredictably to confuse the city, but you are registered as possible patterns.

You live inside a personalized multiverse of nested filter bubbles reflecting your best, most alien self.

AI trained by the historical human archive predicts the nature of the next human experience, tailored for the experience. The result is a perception design project folding in on itself in a continuous feedback loop.

As a file, Air Kiss is the result of a team of humans dreaming an estimate of what could be the dream of AI – this dream itself is a potential database for a neural network to generate a prediction of the next frame.